The "Bullying" or repeated plundering happens in all ages. The larger problem as the intial post suggets is that it has a much more negative effect in the early stages of the game. Never the less it is worth metioning that eaven in Space Age Mars many servers has hoods where players are extremely far apart pointwise. +300 Million vs eg. 24 Million points is quite a span, but at least at this stage the lower ranking players should have learned a few of the normal counters to repeated plundering thus having some income where he or she can "survive regardless" - whereas in the very beginining of the game, most players are simply exploring and learning and will have nearly no if any options to counter continued plundering from long time campers. The only counter available at this early stage is Collecting on Time – and that can be regarded an actual asset for Inno, since it requires a more intensive and less casual play by the new player and continued Activity is part of the FoE game values.
– It is also true that Inno Game supports plundering, else they would never have made GB´s that directly increases the Wins of plundering.
– FoE has untill this point mainly been advertised as a City Builder, though there have been a few campaigns that did not propoes this as the main POS.
It is not only the plundering that makes new players go away, usually a player will happily start to build their city and it takes less than a week with dayli play before a new player hits the first obstacle/challenge to continue to build the city. For players that might have experience form other games or just simply already can see the pattern and correlate that to other much more developed cities it becomes obvious that a very long road lies ahead to even get close to anything substancial citywise. If one then adds dayli plundering from a long term camping player, then the choice to quit is a very easy one to make – This game takes a lot of time, Will I always be plundered like this?, where is the fun in this?.
How a person percieves something is individual but it still has a lot to do with the expectaions build and in particular with something that is supposed to be Entertainment like a game. If FoE was advertised more like War + City game (expect hard times, expect being attacked and your city being plundered), then it would attract other type of players, and the plundering would easily be percieved as something that is just part of the game. It could though also easily create another problem since FoE is not really that effective for War with no peer to peer play, some awkward alogrithms in the PvP and some server lag problems in the GvG - Other games does this a lot better, with both more to loose and more to gain waging war.
I do not have any solutions to this issue, but continued plundering of new players from long term campers is certainly not somehting that makes new players want to continue to play unless they have the time and mindset for it – If this actually is a calculated filtering of players I have no clue, but to some extend it could even be regarded as such even that it does not resonate a lot with the already mentioned part of making War in FoE.
Raising the question on this issue is relevant – but it must also be considered that in any game any options of exploitation will be exploited regardless. And those camping to plunder are on top of things also to be regarded as very active players – putting to much focus on them is not solving the issue.
Personally I get plundered more in my old Space Age Mars city than I do in my about less than one year old HMA city. The only players that plunder me in SAM are all ranking in the top 20 and have been around for as long as I can remember – but I don´t care since it has no real effect on my current casual playstyle and if it gets annoying I can just pull the City Shield for as long as a wish – something I can not do in the new city.
Perhaps FoE should consider to inform new players that they can expect to be plundered and it is therfore a good idea to get to some ages higher as soon as they can. That could be accompanied by giving new players a few extra "Bonus" City Shields calcualted in regard to how long time it takes for each low era with about 6 days of average play weekely. I am not sure this will do the trick, but at least new players would know what to expect and they would learn that the Tavern has some options to avoid/reduce Plundering – and the only "Free" way to get more of that stuff is to play more frequently and to click more – which is essentially part of what Inno wants every player to do.